Largest asteroid in a century to whiz by Sept 1

The largest asteroid in more than a century will whiz safely past Earth on September 1 at a safe but unusually close distance of about 4.4 million miles (7 million kilometers), NASA said

The largest asteroid in more than a century will whiz safely past Earth on September 1 at a safe but unusually close distance of about 4.4 million miles (7 million kilometers), NASA said.

The asteroid was discovered in 1981, and is named Florence after the famed 19th century founder of modern nursing, Florence Nightingale.

“Florence is the largest asteroid to pass this close to our planet since the first near-Earth asteroid was discovered over a century ago,” said a US space agency statement.

It is one of the biggest asteroids in the Earth’s vicinity, and measures about 2.7 miles (4.4 kilometers) wide—or about the size of 30 Egyptian pyramids stuck together.

“While many known asteroids have passed by closer to Earth than Florence will on September 1, all of those were estimated to be smaller,” said Paul Chodas, manager of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies.

Devil’s Tower UFO Rendezvous aims to attract all the UFO enthusiasts

HULETT, WYO. (KOTA TV) – Something out of this world is coming to Hulett, Wyo., and the Devil’s Tower Area, so if you’re a UFO enthusiast you better save the dates.

September 14-16th, 2017, will be the 1st Annual Devil’s Tower UFO Rendezvous.

The convention will last all three days and does require registration fees for activities like field investigation training and attending any of the featured keynote speakers.

On the last day there will be a festival with many free activities throughout Hulett, including a UFO alien themed parade, costume contest with a small fee, a close encounters tower building contest, a barbecue cook-off and live music. Cash prizes will be awarded to the best parade float and costume.

Scientists discover lost languages at Egyptian monastery

The library at Saint Catherine’s monastery has been in continuous use for 1,500 years / KHALED ELFIQI

Ancient works not read by humans since the Dark Ages have been found at an Egyptian monastery, using a technique that allows researchers to reconstruct documents long ago scrubbed off parchment.

The finds at Saint Catherine’s monastery on the Sinai peninsula hailed a “new golden age of discovery”, according to the scientists behind the research, who believe that the methods could reveal many other lost texts.

They have been chronicling the monastery’s library, which has been in continuous use for 1,500 years, but which is today threatened by growing Islamic fundamentalism and attacks on Christians in the region.

Among the discoveries were three ancient Greek medical texts that were previously unknown to scholars, as well as the earliest copies of some from Hippocrates.

‘Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ Director Tobe Hooper Dies At 74

Tobe Hooper, one of the pioneers of the horror genre, died Saturday at age 74. He passed in Sherman Oaks. Hooper made two of the most distinguished films in the fright genre. His low budget 1974 film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which gave a glimpse of the frightful potential of a power tool, and became a favorite on the drive in theater circuit. Made at a cost of $300,000, the film grossed over $30 million at the domestic box office. He also directed Poltergeist.

Tobe Hooper, one of the pioneers of the horror genre, died Saturday at age 74. He passed in Sherman Oaks. Hooper made two of the most distinguished films in the fright genre. His low budget 1974 film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which gave a glimpse of the frightful potential of a power tool, and became a favorite on the drive in theater circuit. Made at a cost of $300,000, the film grossed over $30 million at the domestic box office. He also directed Poltergeist.

Why Men Pretend to Be Women to Sell Thrillers

Almost 10 years ago, Martyn Waites, a British crime writer, was having coffee with his editor. Waites, who was at something of a loose end project-wise, was looking for new ideas. His editor, though, was looking for a woman. Or, more specifically, a high-concept female thriller writer who could be the U.K.’s Karin Slaughter or Tess Gerritsen.

“I said I could do it,” Waites recalls. His editor was skeptical. But then Waites outlined an idea for a book based on a news story he’d once read, about a serial killer targeting pregnant women and cutting out their fetuses. The concept, he admits somewhat bashfully, was a gruesome one.

“That’s exactly what we’re looking for,” was his editor’s response.

That idea became The Surrogate, a crime thriller published in 2009, and Waites simultaneously became Tania Carver, his female alter ego. Before he started writing, he embarked on a period of research, reading novels by popular female crime writers, and made “copious notes” about their various heroes and villains. Waites was an actor before he was a writer, and “Martyn” and “Tania” soon became different personas in his head, almost like characters. He’d sit down to write as Tania and then realize the concept was much better suited to Martyn. Martyn books, he explains, “were more complex, more metaphorical. The kind of things I like in writing.” Tania books were simpler: mainstream commercial thrillers aimed at a female audience. And they rapidly became more successful than any of Waites’s previous books had been.

The case of a male author using a female pseudonym to write fiction was relatively unheard of when Tania Carver emerged, but the explosion of female-oriented crime fiction in the last five years has led to an increasing number of male authors adopting gender-neutral names to publish their work. Last month, TheWall Street Journal’s Ellen Gamerman considered the phenomenon, interviewing a number of writers who fessed up to being men: Riley Sager (Todd Ritter), A.J. Finn (Daniel Mallory), S.J. Watson (Steve Watson), J.P. Delaney (Tony Strong), S.K. Tremayne (Sean Thomas). The trend is ironic, Gamerman pointed out, because the history of fiction is littered with women writers adopting male or gender-neutral pseudonyms to get their work published, from the Brontë sisters to J.K. Rowling.

How A Small Town Record Store Quietly Released An Exclusive Aphex Twin Record

Working away from a cultural capital comes with significant upsides.

by SCOTT STERLING

Well beyond the obvious tropes of Motown, techno and hip-hop icons, evidence of metropolitan Detroit’s reputation as a music city could historically be found within the confines of its record stores. Legendary and sadly long-gone record shops in and around the city were often nearly as important and influential as the music sold in them.

Today, a new crop of budding independent record stores is taking the torch for new and innovative music in southeastern Michigan, none more interestingly than Technical Equipment Supply, which recently made its home in an unlikely place.

Ypsilanti, Mich., is a small Midwestern town of less than 23,000 residents, 36 miles from Detroit and situated just a few miles east of Ann Arbor. “Ypsi” still retains much of it’s mid-20th century charm, and has yet to get caught up in the waves of gentrification sweeping cities across America, primarily in what’s known — both positively and derisively, depending on who’s doing the talking — as “New” Detroit.

“Terminator 2: Judgment Day” Is Still a Deeply Upsetting Blockbuster

“It’s in your nature to destroy yourselves”

Say what you will about James Cameron, but the man commits. Stories of the director’s perfectionism, his control-freak mania, and his sheer drive are legion, but I’m talking about something more fundamental to the work itself. Whereas most action filmmakers are content to let emotion and morality play second fiddle to the more immediate, commercial elements of their movies, Cameron refuses to relegate such things to the background. The love story in Titanicisn’t just an excuse to stage an extravagant disaster flick; it becomes the picture’s raison d’être (and, not coincidentally, a key factor in its success). The environmental and anti-colonial overtones of Avatararen’t there merely to provide some character shading; they practically take over. And now, back in theaters and converted to 3-D, is Cameron’s classic sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day — not just a movie about fighting to prevent nuclear apocalypse, but a movie obsessedwith nuclear apocalypse.

Maybe that wasn’t so clear back in 1991, when it originally came out. The Iron Curtain had recently fallen, effectively ending the Cold War and seemingly lifting the nuclear threat. I distinctly remember Sarah Connor’s occasional ruminations on the fate of the human race eliciting chuckles in my theater at the time. Today, however, the overwhelming despair of T2 is impossible to ignore. This is one of the most upsetting blockbusters ever.

In 1984, Cameron’s original Terminatorplayed a key role in turning Arnold Schwarzenegger into a massive global star, and it was a nasty, brutish little beast of a movie — an R-rated horror flick posing as a sci-fi thriller. But it worked (and became a hit) because, playing a killer super-robot sent from the future by our machine overlords to murder the young woman (Linda Hamilton) who would give birth to the leader of the human resistance, Schwarzenegger used his considerable limitations as an actor to his advantage. Thus did Arnold become an icon of Reaganite, muscles-and-guns spectacle: a terse, emotionless robot racking up an insane body count with an assortment of heavy weaponry.

Reggae helps heal mental wounds of torture for migrants in Italy

Ibrahim Jalloh of Sierra Leone sings during a performance of the Medu Music Band in Rome, Italy. – Reuters

ROME – In a tiny makeshift rehearsal studio in a residential neighborhood of Rome, Nigerian asylum seeker Sylvester Ezeala let slip a smile as he drummed a pair of claves to the mesmeric beat of African reggae.

“I love music. Music is life. It makes you relax and calms your nerves,” said Ezeala, 28, who credits music for obliterating the feelings of loneliness and loss that had brought him to the verge of suicide just a few months earlier.

Ezeala is a member of a band set up by medical charity Doctors for Human Rights (MEDU) to help migrants who experienced torture and extreme violence before fleeing to a new life.

For an increasing number of migrants arriving in Italy bear mental as well as physical scars due to abuse experienced in their country of origin or on their way to Europe, mainly in Libya, according to the Rome-based non-government organization.

MEDU coordinator Alberto Barbieri said most suffer from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, which can cause nightmares, flashbacks, insomnia, guilt and isolation.

“All together these symptoms seriously impair people’s social, work, affective and interpersonal life and … increase isolation,” said Barbieri.

End of an Era: Village Voice Will No Longer Be in Print

by Jeremy Barr

The Village Voice’s Aug. 16-22, 2017 issue

The alt-weekly changed ownership in 2015.

Peter Barbey, who purchased The Village Voice in 2015, has decided to no longer produce a print edition of the alt-weekly. The publication, which was once considered an important voice and platform, has long been distributed for free around New York City.

“For more than 60 years, The Village Voice brand has played an outsized role in American journalism, politics, and culture,” Barbey said Tuesday in a prepared statement. “It has been a beacon for progress and a literal voice for thousands of people whose identities, opinions, and ideas might otherwise have been unheard. I expect it to continue to be that and much, much more.”

The Village Voice, like most historically print-focused publications, has struggled with the shift to less-remunerative digital advertising. The paper was once reliant largely on classified advertising.

“That business has moved online — and so has the Voice’s audience, which expects us to do what we do not just once a week, but every day, across a range of media, from words and pictures to podcasts, video, and even other forms of print publishing,” Barbey said.

How to Watch the Solar Eclipse Like a 1960s School Kid

Caption from LIFE. Fifth-graders at the Emerson School in Maywood, Ill. line up with backs to the sun and their eclipse / Francis Miller—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

If you are one of the lucky Americans in position to see Monday’s total solar eclipse —which will touch 14 states as it crosses the country from coast to coast — you’d do well to take a tip from 1963’s fifth grade class of the Emerson School in Maywood, Illinois. Wielding cardboard boxes and knives that today would surely get a kid suspended, the kids demonstrated for LIFE’s readers how to safely look at an eclipse.

During the solar eclipse of 1960, hundreds of people had suffered permanent eye damage from looking directly at the sun. With help from the Illinois Society for the Prevention of Blindness, Emerson students avoided the same fate by building Sunscopes, pinhole camera-like contraptions that indirectly project an image of the sun. The magazine offered instructions for those desiring to replicate the project at home:

ZZ Top Reveals Meaning Behind Classic Song ‘Legs’

HOUSTON—More than three decades after the song was a chart-topping smash and became an instant classic-rock staple, ZZ Top finally revealed to fans Tuesday the meaning behind its iconic hit “Legs.” “People have been coming up with all these crazy interpretations for 30 years, so we’ve finally decided to just come out and say that the song’s about a woman’s sexy legs and how much they make us want her sexually,” said lead vocalist Billy Gibbons, acknowledging that spelling out the meaning of “Legs” might take away from its longstanding mystique.

The eruption of Mount Vesuvius at Pompeii in 79 A.D. isn’t the only example of life in the ancient world being preserved by the aftermath of a natural disaster. An article in the August 2017 issue of the scientific journal Antiquity reveals how a set of recently uncovered residential buildings in the city of Jerash, Jordan, abandoned after an earthquake in 749 A.D., are shedding new light into the little-known organization of Roman, Byzantine and Early Islamic-era mosaic workshops.

For the first time, according to the article’s authors Achim Lichtenberger and Rubina Raja, scientists have found evidence of what appears to be a mobile mosaicist workshop, confirming previous theories that artisans of the era worked in situ to create tile murals and flooring.

Huge Asteroid to Pass Closely to Earth on September 1st, 2017

An artist’s impression of a large asteroid passing by the Earth. Image Credit: Marcelo6366/Pixabay

Don’t panic, but a massive asteroid more than 2.7 miles across is about to get up-close and personal with the Earth.

While it sounds alarming when we put it that way, NASA assures all of us that the asteroid will harmlessly pass the Earth on September 1st.

The asteroid goes by the name Florence, and it’s one of the largest near-Earth asteroids that come within hair-raising distances of our planet every so often.

“While many known asteroids have passed by closer to Earth than Florence will on September 1, all of those were estimated to be smaller,” said the manager of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), Paul Chodas.

“Florence is the largest asteroid to pass by our planet this close since the NASA program to detect and track near-Earth asteroids began.”

A bot just defeated one of the world’s best video gamers

An artificial intelligence program just annihilated its human competition at a world championship video game contest.

The AI win stunned the gaming community, because bots are generally considered inferior to expert human players.

This one from Open AI — a nonprofit artificial intelligence research firm known mainly for its backing by serial entrepreneur Elon Musk, of Tesla (TSLA) and SpaceX fame — is a different story, and possibly a cautionary one.

To test out some harmless uses for AI, one Open AI team taught a bot to play Dota 2.

Dota 2, for those unfamiliar, is an online multi-player battle game. It works kind of like a complex virtual version of capture the flag. Teams of players use powerful characters, called “heroes,” to battle each other. The game ends when one team has taken down a structure, called an “Ancient,” in the opposing team’s home base.

Should the LAPD use drones? Here’s what’s behind the heated debate

by Kate Mather

For more than three years, a pair of drones donated to the Los Angeles Police Department was locked away, collecting dust after a public outcry over the idea of police using the controversial technology.

Seattle police saw a similar backlash when they wanted to use the devices, grounding their drone program before it even took off. And recently, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s use of a drone has been criticized by activists as well as civilian oversight commissioners who want the agency to stop.

On Tuesday, the LAPD again waded into the heated debate, saying the department wanted to test the use of drones in a one-year pilot program.

Drones have been hailed by law enforcement across the country as a valuable technology that could help find missing hikers or monitor armed suspects without jeopardizing the safety of officers. But efforts to deploy the unmanned aircraft have frequently drawn fierce criticism from privacy advocates or police critics for whom the devices stir Orwellian visions of inappropriate — or illegal — surveillance and fears of military-grade, weaponized drones patrolling the skies.

The LAPD saw that resistance Tuesday even before department brass unveiled details of their proposal to the Police Commission. About three dozen activists gathered before the board’s morning meeting to denounce any use of drones by the department. When the presentation ended, some of those activists leapt to their feet.

Nude Performance Artist Planks in Philosophical Self-Portraits

Chiara Mazzocchi’s nude artworks are anything but personal.

Though nudity and self-portraiture are staples of the art canon, the way Chiara Mazzocchi incorporates both in her visual and performative works is anything but usual. The Italian artist’s use of her own body is meant to be more than just an exploration of her personal self, instead functioning as an attempt to “express the authenticity of the human being connected and relating with nature and the universe and spaces, as a symbol of purity, energy, and light,” in the artist’s own words.

Seeing How Sex Dolls Are Made Is Hauntingly Eerie (NSFW)

Being inside a sex doll factory and watching all that plastic nakedness get shaped is much more haunting than it is titillating. It gets unsettling, like if you were trapped inside a scene from a horror movie and couldn’t get out. But it’s also somewhat intriguing, just to see the mixture of products and body parts that they put together in a puzzle to shape a doll.

Asteroid to shave past Earth inside Moon orbit: ESA

An asteroid the size of a house will shave past Earth at a distance of some 44,000 kilometres (27,300 miles) in October, inside the Moon’s orbit, astronomers said (AFP Photo/NASA)

Paris (AFP) – An asteroid the size of a house will shave past Earth at a distance of some 44,000 kilometres (27,300 miles) in October, inside the Moon’s orbit, astronomers said Thursday.

The space rock will zoom by at an eighth of the distance from the Earth to the Moon — far enough to just miss our geostationary satellites orbiting at about 36,000 kilometres, according to the European Space Agency (ESA).

“It will not hit the Earth,” said Detlef Koschny of ESA’s “Near Earth Objects” research team. “That’s the most important thing to say.”

Dawn of the bionic age: Body hackers let chips get under their skin

BY TIM JOHNSON

Doug Copeland, left, prepares to implant a microchip in the hand of Kyle Spiers at a workshop at the DefCon 2017 convention in Las Vegas July 28, 2017. Hackers who implant microchips are known as “grinders,” a term taken from a comic book. Tim JohnsonMcClatchy

If you’re prone to forgetting your card key for the office or your computer password, here’s a solution: Get a microchip implanted in your hand.

That’s what Brian McEvoy has done multiple times. He’s got five implants, mostly for functional reasons but one just for fun.

“There’s a glow-in-the-dark implant on the back of my right hand,” said McEvoy, a 36-year-old electrical engineer from St. Paul, Minnesota.

For years, owners have implanted microchips in their pets to recover them if they go astray. Farmers use them in cattle. Now, humans are experimenting with subdermal microchips, which are the size of a large grain of rice, to make modern life easier.

Ever so slowly, a trend that began in the hacker community is moving toward the mainstream. A Wisconsin firm that specializes in designing company break rooms, Three Square Market, announced last month that it was offering implanted chips to all its employees.

Russian Woman Known as ‘Sexiest Motorcyclist’ on Instagram Killed in High-Speed Crash

“She was breaching every rule of safety and riding at high speed pretty often,” her friend told local media.

A woman who gained a reputation as the “sexiest motorcyclist” on Instagram thanks to her risque outfits and even riskier style of riding was killed in a high-speed crash in city of Vladivostok, Russia on Monday, according to The Sun.

40-year-old Olga Pronina, known to her followers on Instagram as “Monika,” reportedly died almost instantly when she lost control of her BMW S1000RR while riding down a motorway in the early evening and struck the middle guardrail at high speed. Pictures obtained by The Sun show the bike was basically obliterated.

A friend who arrived on scene minutes later told The Sunthat the force of the crash sent the BMW’s rear wheel bouncing almost 2,000 feet further down the road. Another friend told The Sun that Pronina was “was breaching every rule of safety and riding at high-speed pretty often,” adding that her death is “incredibly tragic.”

Pronina had accumulated over 180,000 followers on Instagram, where she posted pictures of herself modeling with various motorcycles and videos showing her rocketing through traffic at speeds over 150 mph while wearing…well, let’s call it insufficient protection for the task at hand.

Way before Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, the enigmatic blonde bombshell was famous for being famous, perpetually driving the streets of Hollywood in that pink Corvette. But her true identity has remained secret all these years … until now.

“Would you be interested in a story on Angelyne’s true identity?” the man wrote last fall under a pseudonym, referring to the enigmatic L.A. billboard diva who has been a pop culture icon of self-creation and self-marketing since the early 1980s — and is now regarded as a forerunner to Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian and every personal-brand hustler on social media. “I have many details on her life — all well documented — from when her parents met to early adulthood. It’s very different from her public, concocted story — and more interesting.”

Angelyne is one of the vanishingly few contemporary public figures whose background has remained shrouded in mystery, along with the conceptual artist Banksy, Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto and aircraft hijacker D.B. Cooper. The man, who claimed to work in an undefined role for the federal government, said he was a hobbyist genealogist, occasionally taking on paid assignments in the field as an amusing side gig. A few years earlier, he’d decided it’d be fun to set himself the challenge of cracking Angelyne’s case. “And I did,” he explained.

Later, at the 101 Coffee Shop in Hollywood, the genealogist — who looks like Michael Kelly’s contained political operative Doug Stamper from House of Cards — unfurled an elaborate story of Angelyne’s past, based on material he contended he’d enterprisingly pulled and synthesized from a global network of public databases. He laid down a folded printout of a row of yearbook photos.

SunPress’ expansion efforts follow recent announcements that new pressing plants are due to open in Japan, Seoul, and Melbourne.

The company is housed in the former Final Vinyl HQ, founded in the 1970s by pioneering Jamaican producer Joe Gibbs. In its previous incarnation the factory was responsible for pressing and distributing all of Studio One’s output, including records from Bob Marley, Toots and the Maytals and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry.

Broadway Will Dim The Lights For Sam Shepard

On Broadway, Shepard debuted with his contribution to the musical revue Oh! Calcutta! (1969) followed by Operation Sidewinder (1970), a revival of Oh! Calcutta!(1976), Buried Child (1996), True West (2000), and Fool for Love (2015). He received Tony Award nominations in 2000 for True West and 1996 for Buried Child, for which he had earlier been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

“Sam Shepard was a prolific storyteller who created provocative, thoughtful, and exciting work for Broadway, off-Broadway, and film. His original voice was a definite draw for audiences and had an undeniable influence on other artists,” said Charlotte St. Martin, President of the Broadway League. “He will be greatly missed. Our thoughts are with his family, friends, and colleagues.”

PREVIOUSLYwith more information: Sam Shepard, whose snaggle-toothed smile, craggy good looks and outlaw style as actor and writer made him an American icon in the mold of Gary Cooper and Marlon Brando, died July 27 at home in Kentucky. He was 73 and had been suffering from ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. He was surrounded by family at the time of his death, according to Chris Boneau, a family spokesman.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, actor, author, screenwriter and director, Shepard was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his portrayal of pilot Chuck Yeager in Philip Kaufman’s 1983 film The Right Stuff. The author of 44 plays, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 for Buried Child and was best known for such works as Fool for Love, True West and A Lie of the Mind. In 2009 he was named the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award as a master American dramatist.